ABSTRACT
The reclassification of disciplines is transforming the scholarly landscape, challenging established priorities and reshaping the ways innovations have traditionally circulated. It is a moment of uncertainty, too, in the sense that the dominant paradigms once sought in Marxism, structuralism, and in methods of quantification are losing their structuring force. One of the basic things at the heart of uncertainty is that it forces people to think in new ways about what acting effectively means. Uncertainty is not experienced by everyone with the same intensity. One could conduct a futile exercise by taking all the books on Africa from the mid 1970s up to now and looking at how often the notion of crisis occurs. To manoeuvre, thus, supposes a kind of cartography of the space one lives in. To manoeuvre supposes that people build up a system of intelligibility to which they can refer in order to explain the causes and effects of various phenomena.
